I had a good, and interesting day of Tarot reading today – mostly women, a few repeat customers, and a much more respectable take than Thursday – but there were still large gaps of time when there was nobody in the shop at all, so I finished Game of Thrones, the first book in the Saga of Ice and Fire series, the one everybody is talking about even though they are all talking about the TV series I haven’t seen, so I’m kind of going about it backwards, but, what can I say? I’m a book person.

Daenerys Targaryen breastfeeding baby dragons

When you finish a book on Kindle, they ask you right away to rate it (I gave it 4 stars, which is pretty good, I think) and wrote about a 3 sentence review, which didn’t take because they said I was over by 46 characters. So, they don’t want a review, they want something like a tweet. Fuck that.

That’s why I have a blog. First, it was an exciting, entertaining book, with complex characters you really start caring about, plenty of sex, and absolutely massive amounts of violence. I don’t rate it quite as high as Harry Potter, or even Lord of the Rings, but very few books do rate that high, so, fair enough. It’s the best new thing I’ve read in years, I’ll give it that.

I intend to read more of the series, I’ll give it that, too.

But, I didn’t care for the ending, so if you intend to read the books, or haven’t got past Series One in your TV viewing, stop reading this now, because I’m going to bitch about that for a little bit.

Throughout most of the book, Martin creates a very believable world (except for the variable lengths of the seasons, which would require an irregular orbit of the planet, which doesn’t happen). The animals are like animals which exist, or have existed, people die when stabbed, or hung, or thrown from great heights, or at least are seriously injured, people have appetites and desires which we clearly recognize in our own culture.

There is some talk of magic, and the supernatural, but the smartest characters dismiss it as old wive’s tales. Then, at the very end, Daenerys manages to hatch out 3 several-thousand-year-old dragon eggs by laying them on her husband’s funeral pyre (it hadn’t worked when she’d just tried an ordinary fire) and throwing in a lot of horse blood and a (not completely innocent) human sacrifice.

Of course it works.

Then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, the final scene is one of her breastfeeding the baby dragons. BULLSHIT! Dragons are not mammals, they are hatched from eggs, and therefore do not drink milk. They wouldn’t have milk if their mother was a dragon, because dragons do not have tits, so why should they be so eager to slurp down the trans-species milk?